A small plane with four people aboard crashed at an airfield in Georgia and local authorities are reporting that three people were killed, an FAA spokeswoman said. The crash occurred around 10 a.m., Henry County sheriff's Lt. Randy Moore said. According to Kathleen Bergen, an FAA spokeswoman, local authorities say three people were killed and one was injured. ... http://abcnews.go.com

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has held talks with leaders in the Kurdish area of northern Iraq. During her visit - the latest leg of a regional tour - Ms Rice met Kurdish regional leader Massoud Barzani. The pair discussed Iraq's oil industry, in which Mr Barzani's Kurdish region is a key producer. Ms Rice also urged the Kurdish leader to work with Sunni and Shia groups, particularly on the issue of sharing Iraq's oil wealth across Iraq. She flew into Baghdad on Thursday for an unannounced visit and held talks with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Oil tensions The Kurds have been signing oil exploration deals with foreign companies, stirring unease in Baghdad. ...http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/5412178.stm

Catholic experts are expected to advise Pope Benedict XVI that teachings on the state of limbo - somewhere between heaven and hell - should be amended. For centuries many Roman Catholics have believed that the souls of babies who die before baptism remain in limbo. But the concept has never been part of official Church teaching, and it is thought Pope Benedict may be keen to do away with it. The Pope has been quoted as dismissing the notion as a mere "hypothesis". The Catholic Church is concerned about the grief suffered by the parents of stillborn babies, which could be compounded if they believed the souls of their children were to be excluded from heaven. The theory of limbo was expounded in the Middle Ages as a solution to the theological question over what happened to the souls of babies who had not been cleansed by baptism of the "original sin" Catholics believe is inherent in all humanity, but were too young to have committed any sins of their own....http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5412166.stm

Thousands of people in Apex, North Carolina, were ordered out of their homes on Friday after a late-night fire at a hazardous waste plant sent a toxic cloud over the Raleigh suburb, emergency officials said. A series of explosions at the Environmental Quality Company plant, 10 miles southwest of Raleigh, sent a cloud of dangerous chlorine gas into the air and around 16,000 people, about half the town's population, were told to evacuate their homes, officials at Apex Emergency Management Services said.No injuries or deaths were reported, but officials said more than a dozen people, including firefighters and police officers, were being treated at area hospitals for respiratory problems....http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061006/ts_nm/chemicals_apex_dc

Fire swept through a historic downtown church early Friday, collapsing its steeple and flicking off embers that set fire to two other buildings, one of them 22 stories tall. No injuries were immediately reported. The First United Methodist Church, built in 1893, was largely destroyed. Its roof caved in, the steeple toppled, and some of the walls crumbled onto the streets. The flames then spread to two other buildings about three blocks from the church, including the Lincoln American Tower, once the tallest building in Memphis. A developer was renovating one of the buildings into condominiums....http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/10/06/memphis.fire.ap/index.html?section=cnn_us

A former top purchasing agent for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York was sentenced to more than six years in prison Thursday for his role in a $2 million kickback conspiracy. Vincent J. Heintz's wife and another man received lesser prison terms. "It was all about greed," U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III told the three as he sentenced them. The judge also ordered them to pay a total of $2.25 million in restitution to the archdiocese. He ordered Heintz, former general manager of Institutional Commodity Service Inc., the archdiocese's central purchasing agent, to serve six years and eight months in prison. He said Heintz was the leader of a scheme that used shell companies, a fictional employee and fabricated records to fool the archdiocese for eight years. ...http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=2534328